“Don’t try to pet it.”
“Want me to tell you what else to touch and what not to touch?”
Rosemary had just lobbed him a good one.
“I wish you would have told me that years ago, Rosemary. Could have saved me some trouble and made me evenmorepopular than I am.”
She grinned at him. “Leaves of three, let it be, sweetie. Don’t pick me any wildflowers if you don’t know the names of them. And don’t you slip up and carve the wrong initials in that tree.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you have anything to worry about there.”
Pines, manzanita, Indian paintbrush, oaks, firs, redwoods and all manner of greenery kept the trails shaded for the most part, but the sun was ruthless where it made it through the tree cover, and it helped incinerate a little of J. T.’s restlessness.
He was halfway up the trail when his phone chimed in with a text.
He scrambled for it. He exhaled.
Still not his agent.
It was from Linda Goldstein.
John Tennessee, I have a stash of signed photos from Blood Brothers days. The ones with floppy hair. Do you still want to use them? If not, what would you like me to do with them?
Linda was the president of his fan club. He was bemused he stillhadan official fan club, let alone one with an elected officer; it was really more of a skeleton crew of women who never abandoned anything they started, bless them, whether it was a knitted afghan or organized adulation for star of a program that was popular before most of them were moms.
J. T. texted back:
Laminate them and use them as placemats for your cat’s dinner? Offer them to your boys for target practice?
A moment later a message trilled in:
HA HA HA! You’re the BEST. I know The Rush is going to be GREAT!
Accompanied by a flurry of emojis: various smiles and clapping hands and one inexplicable cat.
Linda had evolved from a gushy, giddy, alarmingly well-organized Tennessee McCord worshipper into a happily married, cheerfully harried, alarmingly well-organized mother of two teenage boys. And now she treated J. T. more or less like one of them: with a blend of affectionate “Go get ’em, Tiger!” and concerned clucking. She’d always been unequivocally on his side, which he obviously didn’t always deserve.
He texted back:
You can recycle them if you want. I’ll get you some new ones. We’ll have some great stills from The Rush.
Emojis in principle got on his nerves the way cherubs did.
But he hesitated.
And then added a smiling emoji before he sent it. Just a basic one. Because he knew she would enjoy it.
He wondered what Britt Langley’s policy on emojis was.
He smiled to himself, and then the smile evolved into a frown.
He was positive she hadn’t believed him, but hehadn’tasked a woman out in a long time. Not in so many words, anyway. For the past fifteen years, before Rebecca, it was more often than not his people calling some actress’s people and arranging a date. Or him saying yes to some hot woman who had flung herself into his path. Not that he was complaining, necessarily.
And he hadn’t gotten laid in... well, it wasn’t like he’d made marks on his wall like a prisoner in a cell. Months had gone by, though. Long enough for him to start feeling twitchy.
It was hardly for lack of opportunity.
It was just that the whole thing with Rebecca had left him feeling scorched and sobered. Together they’d been any publicist’s wet dream. They really should have worked. They were probably too dazzled by each other and their own publicity and mostly too busy to realize they excelled at making each other miserable, and it started to become really clear when her career took off and his foundered. He felt like he’d given the relationship his best shot. But there was no getting around the fact that they’d been hurtling toward the inevitable messy end for some time.
